THE BEST BOOK ON EUGENICS.Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most vulnerable citizens.

Wesley SmithNational Review

COMPELLING--THE ZEAL OF AN AVENGER.Investigative journalist Edwin Black compellingly argues that the ethnic-cleansing movement that culminated in Nazi Germany's death camps during World War II was the realization of a particularly ugly American dream. Black, whose mother lived under Nazi rule in Poland, writes here with the zeal of an avenger,

Gregory MottWashington Post Book World

A BOMBSHELL.In this bombshell of investigative journalism, author Edwin Black reveals that eugenics was extensive, systematic, well-funded, and supported by major political and intellectual leaders. Perhaps most startling, eugenics directly inspired the rise of Nazism in Hitlerâ€™s Germany â€¦ This chilling and well-researched book is highly recommended.

Gregg SappLibrary Journal

CHILLING.Chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States.

Daniel KevlesNew York Times Book Review

SCARY AND NECESSARY.Edwin Black is a dangerous man. He tells us things we don't want to hear. His groundbreaking new book, War Against the Weak...is a scary and necessary book.

Adrienne MillerEsquire Magazine

SHOCKING AND GRIPPING.An impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping.

Starred ReviewPublishers Weekly

IMPRESSIVE.Impressive, probably the history of eugenics for the foreseeable future.

Ray OlsonBooklist

AMBITIOUS. RICHLY DETAILED.War Against the Weak is a much more ambitious undertaking. Edwin Black is on a mission ... He's written a serious, thoroughly documented study. The scope of the book is impressiveâ€”it spans 150 years and reaches into the archives of four countriesâ€”and it contains some remarkable new data and sharp insights â€¦ Black has the right credentials to "tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world." â€¦ The author brings a critical sensibility to his work, morally anchored in his parents' harrowing escape from the Nazis.

Tony PlattLos Angeles Times Book Review

FIERCE. A PRODIGIOUS FEAT OF REPORTINGWar Against the Weak offers a fierce, compelling, overlong account of how American ideas helped inspire -- if that's the right word -- Hitler's Reich. â€¦ War Against the Weak is well told and extraordinarily sad. It represents a prodigious feat of reporting, as Black has trolled every archive and read every letter (and published excerpts from far too many of them). And it is a very persuasive book.

David PlotzMother Jones Magazine

SENSATIONAL.At the beginning of the last century, American scientists, politicians and livestock breeders decided to "create a superior Nordic race." Sixty-thousand men and women, most of them poor or of color, underwent compulsory sterilization - an idea that stimulated the Nazi's eugenics program. The full extent of this medical crime has been described by American journalist Edwin Black in a sensational book.

Paul RanierDer Spiegel

HAIR-RAISER AND EYE OPENER. A hair-raiser and an eye-opener ... contains details so vivid and horrid that one can hardly believe them or bear to read them. ... This is an important book, filled with little-known facts about how some of our most esteemed institutions and professionals have funded and practiced very bad science, if it was science at all, and how this pseudoscience permeated much of the world's thinking and led to the atrocities of a world war.

Nancy SchapiroSt. Louis Post-Dispatch

MOST CHILLING. War Against the Weak is filled with tale after tale of arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty â€” accounts that Black wisely allows the eugenicists to relate in their own wordsâ€¦. Perhaps most chilling, though, were the ways in which American eugenicists influenced their German counterparts.

Carl ZimmerDiscovery

MINDBLOWING.Mindblowing ... Combining gripping narrative with corroborating facts and figures, Black connects the dots to what many know, at best, piecemeal: that the racist American pseudoscience of eugenics, pioneered in the first three decades of the 20th century, provided the basis of Hitler's quest for a so-called Master Race.

Cynthia DettelbachCleveland Jewish News

WELL-DOCUMENTED. COMPREHENSIVE.An important, well-documented, comprehensive exposition of a story not known to most Americans, about a perversion of the pursuit of knowledge in the interest of race and social superiority.

Steve CourtneyHartford Courant

CHILLING AND THOROUGHLY RESEARCHED.Chilling and thoroughly researched â€¦ it is a book whose message must be made known â€¦ for those who say â€œIt canâ€™t happen here.â€

Mark LewisTampa Tribune

VALUABLE CONTRIBUTION.It is apparent from Blackâ€™s research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy. The Nazi experiments with X-rays to sterilize their victims, euthanasia and even the gas chamber were all at one time oranother proposed by American eugenicists as a means of eliminating the unfit from American life. To the extent that Blackâ€™s research documents this connection between early 20th-century eugenics policy and its extreme escalation by the Nazis in the death camps, the book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Holocaust.

Jack FischelThe Forward

SOBERING ACCOUNT.War Against the Weak is a sobering account of what can happen and has happened even in a free country like the United States, and is an important historical witness as we move into a new genetic age. It will surprise many readers to know what has happened in just the past century, but Black's account is fair and well documented throughout. It is, at times, very difficult to read, particularly in the sections regarding the Nazi experiments, but it is a valuable book for anyone interested in the history of eugenics and genetic discrimination and is a much-needed resource forthose seeking to prevent such discrimination in the future.